History of England, from the Accession of James II - (Volume 1, Chapter 01) — Chapter I, Part 7

It was in the Parliament of 1601 that the opposition which had, during forty years, been silently gathering and husbanding strength, fought its first great battle and won its first victory.

The ground was well chosen.

The English Sovereigns had always been entrusted with the supreme direction of commercial police.

It was their undoubted prerogative to regulate coin, weights, and measures, and to appoint fairs, markets, and ports.

The line which bounded their authority over trade had, as usual, been but loosely drawn.

They therefore, as usual, encroached on the province which rightfully belonged to the legislature.

The encroachment was, as usual, patiently borne, till it became serious.

But at length the Queen took upon herself to grant patents of monopoly by scores.

There was scarcely a family in the realm which did not feel itself aggrieved by the oppression and extortion which this abuse naturally caused.

Iron, oil, vinegar, coal, saltpetre, lead, starch, yarn, skins, leather, glass, could be bought only at exorbitant prices.

The House of Commons met in an angry and determined mood.

It was in vain that a courtly minority blamed the Speaker for suffering the acts of the Queen's Highness to be called in question.

The language of the discontented party was high and menacing, and was echoed by the voice of the whole nation.

The coach of the chief minister of the crown was surrounded by an indignant populace, who cursed the monopolies, and exclaimed that the prerogative should not be suffered to touch the old liberties of England.

There seemed for a moment to be some danger that the long and glorious reign of Elizabeth would have a shameful and disastrous end.

She, however, with admirable judgment and temper, declined the contest, put herself at the head of the reforming party, redressed the grievance, thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified language, for their tender care of the general weal, brought back to herself the hearts of the people, and left to her successors a memorable example of the way in which it behoves a ruler to deal with public movements which he has not the means of resisting.

In the year 1603 the great Queen died.

That year is, on many accounts, one of the most important epochs in our history.

It was then that both Scotland and Ireland became parts of the same empire with England.

Both Scotland and Ireland, indeed, had been subjugated by the Plantagenets;

but neither country had been patient under the yoke.

Scotland had, with heroic energy, vindicated her independence, had, from the time of Robert Bruce, been a separate kingdom, and was now joined to the southern part of the island in a manner which rather gratified than wounded her national pride.

Ireland had never, since the days of Henry the Second, been able to expel the foreign invaders; but she had struggled against them long and fiercely.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English power in that island was constantly declining, and in the days of Henry the Seventh, sank to the lowest point.

The Irish dominions of that prince consisted only of the counties of Dublin and Louth, of some parts of Meath and Kildare, and of a few seaports scattered along the coast.

A large portion even of Leinster was not yet divided into counties.

Munster, Ulster, and Connaught were ruled by petty sovereigns, partly Celts, and partly degenerate Normans, who had forgotten their origin and had adopted the Celtic language and manners.

But during the sixteenth century, the English power had made great progress.

The half savage chieftains who reigned beyond the pale had submitted one after another to the lieutenants of the Tudors.

At length, a few weeks before the death of Elizabeth, the conquest, which had been begun more than four hundred years before by Strongbow, was completed by Mountjoy.

Scarcely had James the First mounted the English throne when the last O'Donnel and O'Neil who have held the rank of independent princes kissed his hand at Whitehall.

Thenceforward his writs ran and his judges held assizes in every part of Ireland; and the English law superseded the customs which had prevailed among the aboriginal tribes.

In extent Scotland and Ireland were nearly equal to each other, and were together nearly equal to England, but were much less thickly peopled than England, and were very far behind England in wealth and civilisation.

Scotland had been kept back by the sterility of her soil;

and, in the midst of light, the thick darkness of the middle ages still rested on Ireland.

The population of Scotland, with the exception of the Celtic tribes which were thinly scattered over the Hebrides and over the mountainous parts of the northern shires, was of the same blood with the population of England, and spoke a tongue which did not differ from the purest English more than the dialects of Somersetshire and Lancashire differed from each other.

In Ireland, on the contrary, the population, with the exception of the small English colony near the coast, was Celtic, and still kept the Celtic speech and manners.

In natural courage and intelligence both the nations which now became connected with England ranked high.

In perseverance, in selfcommand, in forethought, in all the virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.

The Irish, on the other hand, were distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous.

They were an ardent and impetuous race, easily moved to tears or to laughter, to fury or to love.

Alone among the nations of northern Europe they had the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural turn for acting and rhetoric, which are indigenous on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

In mental cultivation Scotland had an indisputable superiority.

Though that kingdom was then the poorest in Christendom, it already vied in every branch of learning with the most favoured countries.

Scotsmen, whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched as those of the Icelanders of our time, wrote Latin verse with more than the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science which would have added to the renown of Galileo.

Ireland could boast of no Buchanan or Napier.

The genius, with which her aboriginal inhabitants were largely endowed' showed itself as yet only in ballads which wild and rugged as they were, seemed to the judging eye of Spenser to contain a portion of the pure gold of poetry.

Scotland, in becoming part of the British monarchy, preserved her dignity.

Having, during many generations, courageously withstood the English arms, she was now joined to her stronger neighbour on the most honourable terms.

She gave a King instead of receiving one.

She retained her own constitution and laws.

Her tribunals and parliaments remained entirely independent of the tribunals and parliaments which sate at Westminster.

The administration of Scotland was in Scottish hands; for no Englishman had any motive to emigrate northward, and to contend with the shrewdest and most pertinacious of all races for what was to be scraped together in the poorest of all treasuries.

Nevertheless Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources.

Though in name an independent kingdom, she was, during more than a century, really treated, in many respects, as a subject province.

Ireland was undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the sword.

Her rude national institutions had perished.

The English colonists submitted to the dictation of the mother country, without whose support they could not exist, and indemnified themselves by trampling on the people among whom they had settled.

The parliaments which met at Dublin could pass no law which had not been previously approved by the English Privy Council.

The authority of the English legislature extended over Ireland.

The executive administration was entrusted to men taken either from England or from the English pale, and, in either case, regarded as foreigners, and even as enemies, by the Celtic population.

But the circumstance which, more than any other, has made Ireland to differ from Scotland remains to be noticed.

Scotland was Protestant.

In no part of Europe had the movement of the popular mind against the Roman Catholic Church been so rapid and violent.

The Reformers had vanquished, deposed, and imprisoned their idolatrous sovereign.

They would not endure even such a compromise as had been effected in England.

They had established the Calvinistic doctrine, discipline, and worship; and they made little distinction between Popery and Prelacy, between the Mass and the Book of Common Prayer.

Unfortunately for Scotland, the prince whom she sent to govern a fairer inheritance had been so much annoyed by the pertinacity with which her theologians had asserted against him the privileges of the synod and the pulpit that he hated the ecclesiastical polity to which she was fondly attached as much as it was in his effeminate nature to hate anything, and had no sooner mounted the English throne than he began to show an intolerant zeal for the government and ritual of the English Church.

The Irish were the only people of northern Europe who had remained true to the old religion.

This is to be partly ascribed to the circumstance that they were some centuries behind their neighbours in knowledge.

But other causes had cooperated.

The Reformation had been a national as well as a moral revolt.

It had been, not only an insurrection of the laity against the clergy, but also an insurrection of all the branches of the great German race against an alien domination.

It is a most significant circumstance that no large society of which the tongue is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that, wherever a language derived from that of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails.

The patriotism of the Irish had taken a peculiar direction.

The object of their animosity was not Rome, but England; and they had especial reason to abhor those English sovereigns who had been the chiefs of the great schism, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth.

During the vain struggle which two generations of Milesian princes maintained against the Tudors, religious enthusiasm and national enthusiasm became inseparably blended in the minds of the vanquished race.

The new feud of Protestant and Papist inflamed the old feud of Saxon and Celt.

The English conquerors meanwhile, neglected all legitimate means of conversion.

No care was taken to provide the vanquished nation with instructors capable of making themselves understood.

No translation of the Bible was put forth in the Irish language.

The government contented itself with setting up a vast hierarchy of Protestant archbishops, bishops, and rectors, who did nothing, and who, for doing nothing, were paid out of the spoils of a Church loved and revered by the great body of the people.

There was much in the state both of Scotland and of Ireland which might well excite the painful apprehensions of a farsighted statesman.

As yet, however, there was the appearance of tranquillity.

For the first time all the British isles were peaceably united under one sceptre.

It should seem that the weight of England among European nations ought, from this epoch, to have greatly increased.

The territory which her new King governed was, in extent, nearly double that which Elizabeth had inherited.

His empire was the most complete within itself and the most secure from attack that was to be found in the world.

The Plantagenets and Tudors had been repeatedly under the necessity of defending themselves against Scotland while they were engaged in continental war.

The long conflict in Ireland had been a severe and perpetual drain on their resources.

Yet even under such disadvantages those sovereigns had been highly considered throughout Christendom.

It might, therefore, not unreasonably be expected that England, Scotland, and Ireland combined would form a state second to none that then existed.

All such expectations were strangely disappointed.

On the day of the accession of James the First, England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held, and began to be regarded as a power hardly of the second order.

During many years the great British monarchy, under four successive princes of the House of Stuart, was scarcely a more important member of the European system than the little kingdom of Scotland had previously been.

This, however, is little to be regretted.

Of James the First, as of John, it may be said that, if his administration had been able and splendid, it would probably have been fatal to our country, and that we owe more to his weakness and meanness than to the wisdom and courage of much better sovereigns.

He came to the throne at a critical moment.

The time was fast approaching when either the King must become absolute, or the parliament must control the whole executive administration.

Had James been, like Henry the Fourth, like Maurice of Nassau, or like Gustavus Adolphus, a valiant, active, and politic ruler, had he put himself at the head of the Protestants of Europe, had he gained great victories over Tilly and Spinola, had he adorned Westminster with the spoils of Bavarian monasteries and Flemish cathedrals, had he hung Austrian and Castilian banners in Saint Paul's, and had he found himself, after great achievements, at the head of fifty thousand troops, brave, well disciplined, and devotedly attached to his person, the English Parliament would soon have been nothing more than a name.

Happily he was not a man to play such a part.

He began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged during many years between England and Spain; and from that time he shunned hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his neighbours and the clamours of his subjects.

Not till the last year of his life could the influence of his son, his favourite, his Parliament, and his people combined, induce him to strike one feeble blow in defence of his family and of his religion.

It was well for those whom he governed that he in this matter disregarded their wishes.

The effect of his pacific policy was that, in his time, no regular troops were needed, and that, while France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Germany swarmed with mercenary soldiers, the defence of our island was still confided to the militia.